Books: Bureaucrat in a Bog

THE LITTLE EMPERORS (255 pp.)—Alfred Duggan—Coward-McCann ($3).

One dark, wet night A.D. 406, Caius Sempronius Felix, civil governor of Roman Britain, sat shivering all alone in a Hertfordshire bog with only a poor man's cloak against the wind, and wondered how in the world he had come to such a pass. The novelized story of Felix's fall, as told by Britain's Alfred Duggan in The Little Emperors, is the story of the fall of the Roman Empire in Britain.

In the year 405, Roman rule in Britain seemed as placid and secure as it had been 200 years before. True, the garrisons in...